Love Is
by Rianne
Summary: Time was a questionable commodity, but he had always been there. Set after Dead Doll.


**Disclaimer:** CSI get nothing but praise from me for the episode Dead Doll. I would never even be able to pull off pretending to own such greatness!

**Author Notes:** A very surprised Thank You goes out to the mysterious reader who nominated my story Trusting Intimately for the CSI fanfic Awards 2009! I only found out such a thing existed in the last few days! So I am truly honoured. Thank you!!

Sorry I have been missing for a while. This is one of three stories I have been working on recently…

**Story Notes:** This one was partly inspired by a forwarded email that a colleague of mine had pinned up on our staff notice board. I'd imagine that this email has made the rounds everywhere, but in it they had asked children aged between 4 and 8 what 'love' meant. No idea if they were fabricated, but the ideas presented were still sweet. My favourite came from a little one aged 4 who said, _"When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You just know that your name is safe in their mouth."_ and it got me thinking about a story idea I had been considering that it would fit nicely with… so here is the final combination! x

**_Love is…_**

By Rianne

Time was a questionable commodity, but he had always been there.

Every time she had floated close to consciousness.

Each layer peeled back an effort.

She could feel the intensity of his gaze focused upon her.

He was there, he hadn't left.

Not once.

A safe and steady presence in the unfamiliar chaos of the room.

And his being there had been what mattered.

What she had tried to cling to as unconsciousness had torn her back from him with its powerful clutches.

It had been like dreaming at first.

Surrounded by a tumble of sounds.

The line between stumbling in the desert and this place she now found herself in was too blurred.

Was lost to the incomprehensible past.

There were things that she could remember.

Fragments of nightmare too frightening to be fabricated.

There had been light first and confusion.

Cold, she had been cold.

Her body had felt strange, slow to respond.

Everything was blurred in her field of vision.

There had been the beat of rain, and tang of thirst.

A brain throbbing headache.

The pad of coyote paws, the roar of dry dusty wind.

There had been the grind of metal and the raw and bitter taste of fear.

And waiting. Time ticking away.

There had been water, icy, lapping against her skin.

Then in her nose, her mouth, blocking out the sound in her ears and trying to flood her lungs.

Then there had been the need to fight.

The pure and unadulterated rage at the thought that this was it.

This was all the time she got.

And that was not something she'd settle for.

There were people to fight for, people she could count on to be fighting for her, and that had been what was harnessed as she felt the gut retching tear of muscle and sinew and bone, the blinding heat of pain, as she tore her arm from beneath twisted metal until free.

Had hitched her way out from under the weight of the omnipresent car.

Finding her feet.

Staggering away on dazed legs.

Tying her pulsating wounded arm into a sling with strips from her own shirt.

Her rain and flood drenched flesh shuddering in shock and chill.

Pain, worse than anything she had ever felt.

And then there had been nothing but hot and bright and endless sand and sky, and dry and more dry and more dry and headache and thirst and hallucination.

And then rescue.

There had been shouting and loud noises, and rhythmic beeping, and hands lifting and moving and the muscle twinges as she was injected and the poking and the prodding and clattering and a coordinated symphony of medical jargon and motion and a heavy whirring of something…

A helicopter maybe?

Had there been a helicopter?

Through the weight of the medication it had taken her time to realise that she really was alive.

A prospect, which on a cyclical pattern of every few hours, hit her full force when the finite resources of her pain medication reached their limits.

And he was there to reassure her, whispering to her as she murmured incomprehensibly in pain.

There had been other voices too.

Waving in and out of dreamless nothingness.

Familiar voices.

Fading in and out of the silvery clouds fogging her brain.

Leaning close to her ear as they confided, their warm breath wafting over her as they touched her cheek, gentle fingers brushing against her hair.

Familiar voices, with their whispers of relief and affection and hope.

Their touch reassuring, to both the touched and the person touching.

She breathed them in, smelling the outdoors, their sun cream and acrid coffee.

Scents relished in contrast to the sharp clean sterility of the hospital and the Intensive Care Unit she had come to understand that she was in.

Her senses sharper in this dark world of closed eyelids and exhaustion.

She could hear them, baring their souls to her, their fears and their thankfulness.

Greg's voice filled with tears. Quieter than usual, his humour cracking and revealing more about the residual panic he felt than he ever could have with words.

Nick's voice had been scratchy with emotion, and pouring with his usual Southern platitudes that from anyone else would have seemed trite and slick, but from him were heartfelt and endearing.

Warrick and Catherine had come together, whispering to one another as well as to her. Bringing with them a sense of relief, their bantering and playfulness giving them all hope for the future.

Brass had been there too, his fingers faintly rough against her uninjured cheek, calling her 'Kid', reassuring her that things were okay, that Griss was okay, managing to express all he had to say in short and awkward sentences.

Yet not one of them had mentioned his constant presence beside her.

No one had commented on the fact that he had yet to leave her bedside.

His behaviour close to obsessive, close to the border of troubling.

She had overheard them talking, the doctors, the nurses, heard them talking about her as if she was not in the room.

He had been told, over and over by the medical team that she was responding well.

Told over and over that the department was paying for the very best care available.

Told that scans showed that her dehydration and unconsciousness had not seriously affected her brain.

Told that she was just being kept sedated to help her heal.

So that she could rest untroubled by the pain.

Told that she was doing great, that she was amazingly resilient.

That she would open her eyes again soon, that she would be on her feet and dancing out of here before he knew it.

She had actually smiled inside at that thought, and wished that she could have spoken up to inform whomever the phantom doctor was that she would most definitely not be dancing out of here.

Stalking at a hundred miles an hour maybe, but not dancing, her form of uncoordinated movement to music was more likely to get her imprisoned in this place for a much longer term, with more injuries, than be an expression of her delight to be leaving this sterile tomb.

But he was balancing on a knife-edge; there was a tension seeping from him that warned her of his mood.

Stubborn.

Unyielding.

A strength she could rely on, but still a worry.

He would not believe.

He would question the doctors, the specialists, the consultants, any of them.

He could not believe them without some evidence from her.

Some quantifiable response.

He would be there until she opened her eyes and many hours beyond that.

And until then he would broker no argument.

Her other visitors seemed to accept his being there as just what she needed. Perhaps recognising that it was something that he needed just as much.

And that seemed to be okay with them.

There had also been the warm, but no nonsense tone of a woman who must have been her private nurse, calling her 'Honey,' as she shifted about the pillows, tinkered with the IV and lines, flicked switches which changed the cadence of the monitoring beeps of heart and brain.

She had heard that same calm weary, but wise, voice attempt to coax Gil into sleep, and food, or at least rest.

Far and above her duties, and for that she had been more than grateful to this brisk woman.

He in return was too polite to gruffly duck and weave his way out of the suggestions of this woman who so obviously ruled the roost around this unseen place.

Which was much further than Nick and Cath and even Jim had got with him.

But he had only rested for the minimum he had too, and eaten whilst watched.

Once he was without the constant sharp monitoring gaze the nurse's instructions had been deftly ignored as he had ignored the caring and concerned suggestions of the rest of their friends.

Same old Gilbert.

Had she the energy she would have reached out and shook him.

It was selfish, but she needed him to be well, so that he could help her to get well.

And even more selfish was her fear that she might wake up and find him gone.

She never wanted him to leave her alone for even a moment in this cold and still place of illness and pain, if he got too tired, or made himself sick there was a chance that he would be forced to do that.

She needed him here.

But more than anything she wanted to go home.

Through the blurred awareness of her surroundings, she drew comfort from the idea of home.

Held tight to the memories of their home together, the flickering images like little beams of sunlight breaking though the hazy cloud of her brain.

Images honeyed with tenderness, their warm inviting bed, their bathtub made for two, the neatly tended plants, the books, the photographs of happiness which lined the walls and shelves and every conceivable space she had been able to clutter with them.

She wanted to keep those bright thoughts close to her breast, to keep them protected and untainted and special.

Home.

Her very first real home.

That was her one wish. To be there. To be wrapped up warm and loved in that safe comfortable place that had not been touched by fear and pain and terror.

Not corrupted by _her _evil, damaged touch.

But she was too tired to be angry anymore. Her anger towards Natalie had been her food, her strength and driving force whilst she had wandered lost in the desert, whilst she had stared down wild coyotes, when she had hauled herself bleeding and broken from beneath the sinking car.

Her rage had been empowering, had burned hot and feral and set her natural survival instincts ablaze.

And she was alive now because of it.

But she was so tired, too tired to waste her precious energy now on thoughts of hate.

Now she needed to rest and heal and to count up her blessings.

To be thankful for all the wonderful things she had and people who knew and loved her, that Natalie had tried to take away from her.

And failed.

She had been stronger.

Natalie had been wrong.

Gil loved her more.

More than she had even known.

All of her friends loved her.

She had survived.

Had come as far across that desert as she could on her own.

And they in their turn had searched for her and had found her.

It was over.

It hadn't been her day to die after all.

It was really over.

The looming threat was gone.

Natalie was not going to harm her from where she was now.

Brass had told her. Nick had told her. Greg had told her.

Natalie was firmly in custody.

She was free.

Gil had simply told her she was safe.

Safe.

The word so important that it had become tangled in the shimmering and sticky cobwebs that muddled her brain.

Being home would make her feel much safer.

She could see every carefully accumulated detail of their secluded townhouse dance on the inside of her tired eyelids.

She could picture Gil there, laughing with her, see him scratching behind Hank's ears just the way their beast liked it, in that perfect way that made his skinny tail thump the ground.

They should be there.

Not here.

But if she had to be here, she was glad that he was there with her.

Even though she felt guilty for what she knew he must be going through, guilty for wanting him to be well and rested and healthy enough to be there for her.

Guilty, but glad.

In her times of consciousness she was fully aware of her surroundings.

But as of yet she hadn't been able to open her eyes.

She had tried and tried and tried.

But so far the weight of the tissue paper lids was just too immense against the great powers of sedation.

The best she had managed was to get the lashes to move, she remembered flickers of bright white light.

Before she had swooned back into calm darkness.

The sheer effort taking it out of her.

She could hear talking again.

Hushed whispers.

The nurse was back.

She could hear the swish of the curtains and the rattle of the metal loop hooks as the fabric was drawn closed along the rail.

Something was happening.

His was one of the voices, murmuring on the edge of her hearing.

Filtering to her in waves through the now concealing fabric curtain.

There were words exchanging, Gil's delivered in his boding no nonsense tone which made her fantasise for a moment that she was just lying at home curled up in her bed, listening to him on the phone in another room, and she would have fallen happily into that daydream if it hadn't been for the weight of the IV pumping hydration into her through her hand, or the catheter tube against her inner thigh.

The exchange of words ended in a stubborn sounding silence.

Yet she wasn't afraid as long as he was still there.

Then the voices were fading and his careful footfalls returned.

The curtain shielding her wavered as it was breached and then fell back to conceal once again.

The chair beside her bed scraped across the linoleum floor as it was shifted closer.

And his voice was back.

Low and soft.

"She's gone…" he sounded both relived and conspiratorial.

She assumed that he was talking about the nurse.

"I wanted to do this, not her, and she wasn't very happy about it," he sounded far too upbeat and jovial. It wasn't right.

"I hope this is okay," he continued, sounding more wary, the slight awkwardness filtering into his voice.

She imagined that she could see that voice of his as warm blue cloud, wrapping about her protectively.

That voice was the one he used when he crawled late into bed beside her, and she stirred at his motion. The voice he used to lull her back to sleep as he wrapped her in warm arms and nuzzled his nose into her neck.

She longed for that simplicity again.

It was a husky, private kind of voice. One he never used at work.

One that was barely above a whisper and never edged louder.

There was movement again, a faint clunk and then a lapping glug as a container of water was placed beside the bed.

The swishing sound of liquid disrupted and stirred, then something gently stroking lightly across her forehead, spreading a faint trail of moisture. Warm and damp.

Careful deliberate swipes of warm soft cloth, so gentle.

Purposely avoiding the bad patches of grazed and stinging skin.

He was washing her.

Removing the grit and dirt from the places that the medical professionals had missed when they had dowsed her in burning disinfectants.

Caressing over the slope of her nose, over the dry cracked lips, over the curve of her cheeks.

Dusting her eyelashes, shadows blocking out the deep red sky of their insides for just a moment as he obstructed the light.

He was close enough for her to hear him breathing, slow and tired.

He paused as her eyelids fluttered.

Murmured her name.

Sounding far too hopeful.

Far too young and frightened to be the man she knew.

She tried to speak to him, to comfort him.

But damn she was just too weak, she was just too tired.

She couldn't get a single aching muscle to function.

He hovered, waiting for a long time.

But eventually he took to moving the cloth again.

The rhythmic moistening strokes of cloth resuming.

Precise and careful and measured, maybe his only sense of distraction, focusing on a job that needed to be done instead of torturing himself over his thinking.

Even with the tenderness there was something she didn't like about this.

She couldn't help but feel like one of the bodies he processed.

She didn't want to feel like that.

She was okay.

She was going to be okay.

Everything was going to be as it had been.

Before the car and the desert and the miniatures and the pain and dry expanse of unending land.

His fingers shifted what must be tangled strands of her hair back off her forehead, soothing them back, sweeping the hairline.

She felt his warmth approach, familiar now in her personal space, before his nose slid after the cloth.

He hovered there. His nose brushing over hers. Intimately nuzzling her. Stroking over her cheeks. Dusting her eyelashes.

Breathing her in. A painful sounding shudder rumbling through him.

The sound he made was wounded, and the way he tried to smother it, failing terribly, made it all the more heartbreaking.

He was behaving as if he had thought that he had lost her forever.

He was treating her with the kind of awe that only someone given a second chance could understand.

Taking his time to memorize every part of her.

Thankful and desperate not to loose her again.

He just needed to be close to her and she understood that desire.

She felt the warming breeze of his breath ease the chilly tingle the water he had used to bathe her skin had left behind.

With a sigh he eventually carried on with his task, easing the towelling fabric down her neck and throat, he curled the cloth into the furls of her ear, in ways that would normally make her shiver.

Her skin tingled like new when his touch withdrew.

He was washing her ordeal away.

Washing Natalie and her evil off her skin.

Cleansing her to start over again.

The faint splash of water echoed as he rinsed and then wrung the cloth out.

The sounds he made were now further away. He had moved to the end of the bed.

The bed covers were lifted up to her knees, revealing her lower legs and feet, as his tender fingers lifted her right leg placing her heel against his knee.

She could feel the heat of his leg seeping into her ankle. The warm denim both rough and comfortable against the skin.

The remoistened cloth was back, swiping away the grit from between her toes.

The dust and dirt from her ankles and behind her knees.

It felt strange to have him touch her like this.

Stranger still to her that he followed his cleansing with a press of his lips to the protruding curve of her anklebone and then to her sensitive instep.

A few days beard growth, just the long side of stubble, brushed gently against the inside of her leg as he kissed against a tender scratch.

A few days worth.

She must have been missing a few days.

He kissed another place, nearer her knee, where the skin had been chaffed by carpet burns from the trunk of the abducting car.

Healing it with his lips, or at least she imagined he was.

Imagined the warm breath was a fixing heat.

Spreading out, removing the chill of once certain death from her skin.

Filling her with sensation and life.

Making her feel human again.

Affirming his love for her with the press of his lips to her very skin.

She felt like she was watching this happen from the outside.

Felt like an intruder, witnessing this broken and private moment of pain and renewal.

Gil, her beloved quiet and brooding scientist, who she had seen blush when she reached out to hold his hand in public, was sitting here by her hospital bed, gently washing her.

The man of controlled emotions openly expressing how he felt without shame or shyness.

He loved her.

Moving up her bed he began to cautiously wash her unbound arm, skirting carefully around the stinging ligature marks torn into the skin by the sharp edged tie wraps, before pressing tingly kisses to her newly cleansed palm.

Then transferring hands, in the lightest touch she had ever felt from anyone, he cleaned between the fingers of her other hand, working around the clumsy weight of the plaster casting.

Before lowering his head to kiss away the pain of the cuts and bruises that decorated her knuckles.

She knew that the curtain was drawn, but this openness from him made her situation all the more unusual and otherworldly, and in other ways all the more real.

And all the more painful.

And just for them.

She had been surprised when he had kept holding her hand when the others had been in to visit.

He had kept holding her hand, her fingers intimately laced through his, rubbing her palm gently and surreptitiously with his thumb.

It had made her curious too.

She was sure she would have been highly entertained by the looks of surprise on their friends faces when they saw this physical expression of the secret connection between them.

It had made her wish that she was out there in the open with her relationship with him.

She wasn't particularly demonstrative herself when they weren't alone, but sometimes she longed for a little more.

They were both hiding, and by mutual decision, but she was prone to the odd moment where she wished she that she didn't have to wonder what it would be like if others knew that they were together.

Sometimes she felt guilty about it.

Felt like she was hiding, hiding some of the most important things in her life, like her home, her family, the things that were really significant to her and she hated having to make up lies, hated having to misdirect those she needed to share the utmost trust with.

All this secrecy was hard.

Hard on friendships, hard on her emotions, hard on self-confidence.

The odd left over sensation from her younger years still plagued her in vulnerable moments, still taunted her with the thought that maybe he kept her in the shadows out of embarrassment.

But his actions everyday chased away the residual insecurity issues and proved that she had no reason to question his love for her.

Moments like right now.

Her painful arm was lifted with motion so slow and careful she thought she might have imagined it was being moved until it was returned to rest against her stomach once again as the coarse stiff, over-bleached, bed sheets were slowly pulled back.

The scratchy paper-like hospital gown crinkled as the covers were shifted.

She felt the fresher air, felt her skin react to the chill.

And suddenly she wanted him to stop.

Remembered her condition.

She didn't want him to see her like this, all broken and damaged.

Ugly.

He would never think of her the same way after that, never treat her the way he used too.

She was strong, a survivor.

She wasn't weak.

But she was lying.

She wanted him to hold her, to help her, to do everything he was doing.

There wasn't anyone else on earth she would rather have there.

But she was so used to fighting and fending for herself.

So unused to admitting her weaknesses, never wanting to sacrifice her hard earned sense of pride.

But she felt so small and defenceless.

She could feel the damage to her battered body.

Could feel the places that ached with her heartbeat just beyond the haze of medication.

Places bruised and scraped and sore.

A dull throbbing until the morphine wore off and the real fun returned.

Yet until now she had been drifting almost happily under the influence of the loving feelings that his tender actions spread through her, he had distracted her, had made her forget how very vulnerable she was right now.

But his drawing down of the sheet and they way he had partly unwrapped her from the scratchy hospital gown had broken the spell.

Had brought her back to her new uncomfortable reality with a thump.

And his gasp at the extent of the bruising that she could feel along her torso and hip had brought it all back to her again.

She wanted to curl up and hide from him and his scrutiny, and his hurt.

She didn't want to need things done for her.

But she did.

She wanted to be comforted, but she didn't want to be pitied.

Just the tip of the iceberg in her current dilemma.

This must have been what he had meant when he had said that he hoped it was okay.

He was whispering to her again.

His voice sounding so broken.

Talking to try and get through this.

Telling her how the nurse hadn't wanted him to do this, saying that he wanted to be the one to do it, insisted he do it, not some calm, clipped stranger.

Telling her that she deserved better than that.

"You deserve to be taken care of."

His voice wavered.

"Sara…" He took another pained breath. "I should have taken care of you."

So breathlessly quiet she hardly heard him.

She heard the sound of the cloth being rinsed again, he was using the disguise of the waters motion to hide the tremble in his voice.

The guilt twisted in her stomach.

He thought all this was his fault.

It wasn't his fault.

She willed herself to reach out to him.

Willed herself with everything she had.

Tremendous effort making her uninjured arm tense and shudder.

She got her little finger to lift.

Or at least she thought she did.

But he didn't seem to notice.

She felt a hot tear slide from her closed lid and burn a pathway down the side of her nose, across her cheek, tumbling hot into the shell of her ear.

Her frustration a hot shame.

She could hear him working to control his breathing again.

Slow and deep.

Fighting for control.

She could picture him.

Sitting there, eyes closed in that way that furrowed his forehead.

Wounded and sad and exhausted.

She wanted to clamber into his lap.

Tighten her arms about him.

Feel him tighten his around her.

Both of them breaking down in their private place of shelter from the storm.

Soon.

Soon she promised herself.

He was moving the pillows now, shifting her so that he could clean down her side, arranging the feather-filled bundles to support her as comfortably as he could.

Then his careful cleansing wipes caressed feather light over the dark mottled skin that graced her broken ribs.

She could hear his breathing again, painfully controlled until she felt it.

Felt hotter splashes land against her skin.

These little plinks of moisture so much warmer than the lukewarm liquid from the bowl.

He was crying.

She had never seen him cry, never known him to cry before.

It hurt.

He was shuddering, gasping, the strokes of the cloth slowing as he fought to control it.

Breaking down.

He was murmuring her name, over and over, entangled with apologies and hurt and ache.

Long held back emotion pouring out of him as if the damn had broken and the reality of what they had just survived was crashing over him.

He slumped forward, his body giving up the fight against the strain.

He laid his head gently against her breast, the tears flowing hot and fast, his sounds smothered by something, probably his hand.

He had needed to do this for her.

To remove all trace of what had happened.

He felt like this was some how penitence.

Why had this happened to them?

She felt tears of her own seep out of the sides of her eyes, liquid beads of sadness sliding away to become entangled in the strands of her hair.

His weight on her chest lifted.

He was close again.

His lips on her skin, hot and wet and reverent.

The salt of his tears gliding into the rivers of hers.

He must have seen her tears. Felt her tears.

She heard his breath catch.

"Sara…?"

His voice shivered.

She wanted to reply.

He needed her to reply.

That would make him better.

Make this all right again.

She tried to push the sound out.

But only a faint gasp of air whooshed between cracked parted lips.

He nuzzled closer once more.

Kissing her eyelids.

Trembling hands sliding into her hair.

"Please…" He begged.

Her heart throbbed for him.

One simple thing and she just couldn't seem to do it however hard she tried.

She forced the sound again.

And she heard it, a faint gargled growl.

And he was moving back to see her face, her name on his lips again.

She tried it again, relief flooding more tears forth as she finally succeeded.

Her voice, it sounded so weak and crackly and raw.

But he responded like it was music to his ears.

To him that one syllable was everything.

It brought her safely home.

"Gil?"


End file.
